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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

It's not an autonomous vehicle. This mode does operate without a human in the driver's seat, but the human is still expected to observe and intervene if things go wrong. To accommodate the special nature of this, speeds are limited to 1MPH for this particular feature, and the car will move a maximum of 39ft before ending the maneuver.

The problem here is that it's too easy to activate the feature by accident and it's not sufficiently clear when you do so. IMO it needs another confirmation step on the touchscreen after double-clicking the Park button before it goes into the "auto-park after closing the door" mode. It's not a sensor problem; the sensors aren't intended to be foolproof here, they're just a backup.

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Unless you have positive control over the car -- like a radio controlled toy car -- it's autonomous.

It's not like the summon mode is simply disengaging the brake and letting the car roll around randomly.

Perhaps if the feature requires continuous observation by the driver, it should require a continuous 'hold' of the button to operate?

By default, it does. You have to explicitly change a setting (and I believe get a dire warning about what you're about to do) in order to enable it to move hands-off.

Does this include the "double-park and get out" feature this guy went through? I know it works that way with the key fob, but I'd never heard about this way of activating Summon before, and I'm not sure how a dead man's switch would work in this case.

The double-park feature isn't available unless you disable the dead man's switch operation.

Thanks for that explanation. I was wondering why Tesla's response was so lackadaisy, but given that he:

Accepted a beta feature, disabled the safety override, ignored a warning, and failed to observe the car as he was told to;

It simply is operator fault. He can be lucky it wasn't one of these power drills with a "perma-on" button, which would've ended much worse for him.

According to the release notes introducing the feature there's also no way of activating Summon from the key fob or anything other than the mobile app in that firmware version unless you disable dead man's switch operation, which enables the double-press Park feature. Hopefully they've changed it since but it's like Tesla designed it with only two modes - safe but impractical (get out your mobile, unlock it, launch Tesla app, hold down button) and convenient but unsafe (all activation methods enabled, no dead man's switch). See http://electrek.co/2016/02/17/tesla-new-update-autopark-summ... and https://youtu.be/Cg7V0gnW1Us

I don't think using the phone app is particularly impractical. It's usually as convenient to access as the key fob is, and unlocking it and launching the app isn't that hard.

I will admit that the first thing I did when I got the update that defaulted to dead-man's-switch operation was to put it back the way it was. But I was careful to understand the implications of what I was doing, at least.

> I don't think using the phone app is particularly impractical.

In Australia, we don't have the option of disabling the dead man's switch, so we're forced to use the phone app to control Summon.

There are no words in the English language that can begin to describe how frustratingly unreliable it is. Most of the time it simply doesn't work (will say something like "failed to communicate with car"), and even when it does work it tends to lose connection half way and abort. I don't think I've ever managed to complete a Summon without it aborting. This is exacerbated by the fact that the places where I actually need to use Summon tend to be places with poor cell phone reception, e.g. underground car parks.

I can't wait for the key fob-controlled Summon to be enabled in Australia. Summon in its current state is basically useless.

Good points, I wasn't thinking of the communications problems.

It's too bad the phone app can't communicate directly with the car using local radio, like Bluetooth or peer-to-peer WiFi. That would solve this problem and others besides.

Agreed. Unfortunately it seems Tesla requires all control commands for the car to come from their servers through their VPN for security reasons, so the phone can't control the car directly.

If the car was rolling over my child how would I presumably stop it? Nevermind what it "should" do, how would I stop it?

You could press any button on your key fob, press any door handle, or step in front of the car so it detects an obstacle.

Assuming the driver did summon the car he must not have been paying much attention.

Either that or he "butt" summoned it.

Um, if it detects an obstacle, how did it hit the trailer?

It doesn't guarantee to detect every obstacle every time.

> It doesn't guarantee to detect every obstacle every time.

In Silicon Valley, they call this "eventually safe".

Which is probably how it ended up rolling over your child in the (hypothetical) first place.

It has ultrasonic sensors in the bumpers. They're too far down to detect a trailer at windshield level, but they'll detect the legs of a person standing in front of it.

>the human is still expected to observe and intervene if things go wrong. To accommodate the special nature of this, speeds are limited to 1MPH for this particular feature, and the car will move a maximum of 39ft before ending the maneuver

That's what it does? And it can crash into things? How was this hailed as ground-breaking technology? When it was announced it was on the front page of every technology site.

Are you talking about AutoPilot or Summon?

Summon isn't autopilot. It is a pretty lame feature IMHO that I don't think I will ever use as I don't have a garage too small for my car and I avoid parking in similarly tiny parking spots. I know a lot of Tesla S/X owners and none have ever used it.

Dude doesn't deserve the downvotes, Tesla's video in TFA says at :06:

"SUMMON: The next step in Auto Pilot"

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